A bedrock truism of foreign policy is that your friends should trust you and your enemies fear you. Obama, of course, never understood this and now we are seeing the consequences. Russia has no fear of us, and our friends, if we have any left, won’t lift a finger to help us, knowing that we might betray them at any moment.

Pity the poor Ukrainians and the rest of eastern Europe.

Corlyss

Yep. No question Obama got it backwards with the help of his poisonous anti-American ideology. Our enemies trust us and our allies fear us.

Corlyss

To paraphrase some wag,one never went broke betting on the Europeans to do nothing constructive. Head in the sand is their normal position.

Fat_Man

This is why NATO must be dissolved. As far as Europe is concerned, their security is our problem. We have to make it their problem. We will be happy to help, but it must be their problem.

Bruce

We’d just better stay away from sanctions on Putin’s estimated $40 – $70 billion fortune that he has stashed away, largely in Swiss banks. Who knew that the KGB paid so well?

gabrielsyme

I don’t know that Medvedev’s suggestion reveals a “thuggish” world view. While some of Russia’s gas “charges” are questionable, it does remain the case that however calculated, Ukraine is seriously in arrears to Gazprom and that it is entirely legitimate that Russia be paid for its goods.

If Europe is really concerned about security of supply, it does make sense to transfer the debt from one Ukraine owes to Russia to one it owes to the EU; while the EU would have to worry about collecting the money, at least it will have bought some degree of supply security; how much security is disputable, of course. And the EU might have assumed the role of bank to Ukraine, but how much different is that from its current strategy?